Pesky's Blog

Since I’ve begun blogging semi-regularly I’ve learned that having visuals helps especially when it comes to talking about different locations and their relation to each other. It can be difficult to judge the space and distance between two streets in a city or two cities in a country without some familiarity with the location. A problem I come across frequently when reading transit-related articles and blogs. It’s for this reason I try to include maps in my transport-related posts from very early on. Read more...

Timetable or schedule graphs visualise railway traffic on a route during a set time. Typically when these graphs are shared online they look like they’ve been created using jTrainGraph although I find it very difficult to get started. I attempted to use both Google Sheets and LibreOffice Calc to some degree of success but only achieved what I wanted through by using R. This was made possible by a single StackOverflow question from 2011. Read more...

The MerwedeLingelijn stretches 49km from Dordrecht to Gorinchem across the Drechtsteden, Molenlanden, and Gorinchem (DMG) regions in Zuid Holland. The line is mostly single-track with passing opportunities at most stations. Like other public transport modes in the area, the trains on the MerwedeLingelijn are operated by Qbuzz. They began providing public transport in the DMG regions in 2018, taking over from Arriva. With that, Qbuzz also inherited 10 electric Stadler GTW trains to run services on the line. Eight of these trains are 3-car GTW 2/8’s and the other two are 2-car GTW 2/6’s. These trains were delivered and put in service between 2008 and 2011 while Arriva still ran the line. Read more...

As a long-time user of RSS (Really Simple Syndication) to consume media, I thought I’d write a short post about it. The first specification was released on 15 March 1999, so it did celebrate its 25th birthday yesterday after all. Subscribing to RSS feeds allows you to receive updates on new posts to a website, it’s used by news aggregators to get you articles from different sources, and most famously used to deliver the latest podcast episodes to your app of choice. 1 Read more...

Granting a user permission to access resources across AWS accounts is a common task, typically the account with the resources contains an IAM role with the appropriate policy defining the actions the user can perform. In addition to this a trust policy is created that specifies which principal can assume that role in order to perform the allowed actions. Sometimes an external ID is added to the trust policy which verifies the user wanting to assume that role. There are good reasons to use this, which I will refer to the AWS documentation for. Read more...

When examining passenger mobility, there are many angles from which to explore effective transportation systems: service reliability, cleanliness, comfort, cost, transit coverage, service frequency, and more. While this topic is extensive, I will specifically focus on the coverage of a public transit network within an area and the significant role that frequency plays in it. I will be using the public transit system in the region of Utrecht, which is operated by Qbuzz under the name U-OV, as a demonstration. The region includes nine municipalities and a population of over 700,000. A total of 46 routes are run by U-OV, four of which are light rail and the rest are bus. Read more...

AWS allows you to enable server-side encryption (SSE) for you data at rest in your SQS queue. Disabling this option also has an effect on your encryption in transit as well. From the SQS documentation: All requests to queues with SSE enabled must use HTTPS and Signature Version 4. In other words disabling SSE also means you can now communicate to the SQS without TLS. I wrote a Python script to send a message to a queue using the HTTP API and botocore without using the higher level abstractions of boto3. Note the endpoint used uses http and not https. Read more...

This week I open sourced a Terraform project I’ve been using for the past few months. This solution allows the user to schedule the start or stop of EC2 instances in a single AWS account. This schedule is defined through Terraform and created EventBridge Schedulers. This post will be a snapshot in time of how the solutions looks at the time of publishing. An up to date and concise description of the solution can be found on its GitHub page. Read more...

The Venlo train station has a great regional express connection to North Rhine-Westphalia (NRW), Germany every hour operated by Eurobahn from 5 am to 10 pm. The station also has stoptrein services to Nijmegen and Roermond along the Maaslijn, where they go twice an hour in both directions operated by Arriva. Lastly, it has an NS Intercity service to Dordrecht via Schiphol Airport, which is also twice an hour. As good as the timetable is, the services that connect you to and from the German train could be better. Read more...

On my Linux machine I have sometimes shared by screen as a virtual device so it can be used in other programs as a webcam. A similar FFmpeg can also just be used to capture video to the file as well. Capture as a video device The v4l2loopback module allows you to create a virtual video devices under /dev/. Read more...

This is the third installment about Sprinters in the Netherlands. In the first post we’ve taken a look at the emergence of more regional, sprinter-like services in the 1970s as the Dutch moved towards suburbanisation. This required a new trainset designed to provide stop-train services, which was called the Stadsgewestelijk Materieel (SGM) and was first purchased in 1972. After three decades of service, between 2003 and 2006, the fleet of 90 SGMs was renovated, extending their lifespan to 2021. We also touched on the failure of the Stoptreinmaterieel ‘90 (SM ‘90), which was supposed to be the successor to the SGM. In 2005, the plans for the Sprinter Light Train (SLT) were developed based on the proven Baureihe 425, following the failure of the SM ‘90. A total of 131 sets were ordered, containing four and six-part lengths, and delivery began in 2008. Read more...

This Christmas my wife and I booked a semi-spontaneous trip to Berlin, Germany for a few days. Our trip included visiting the typical Christmas markets, restaurants, East Side Gallery, and Museum Island. Most of our traveling around the city was done through the public tram network, with the occasional use of the U or S-Bahn. A line from Vladimir Nabokov’s 1925 short story, A Guide to Berlin, comes to mind. Read more...

You can track changes to a tag through AWS CloudTrail, AWS Config, or Amazon CloudWatch Events, these methods have already been documented but they’re too slow to respond to changes, too expensive to run, not as extensible out-of-the-box, or outdated. I haven’t seen much coverage on doing this with Amazon EventBridge, which has many integration options, is low-latency, and is fairly low cost (and in this case free). There is a page in the documentation titled Monitor tag changes with serverless workflows and Amazon EventBridge that covers just that, I’d recommend starting there. Read more...

To show related content on this blog I use Hugo’s in-built functionality, which works surprisingly well with no setup. I did, however, want to test out creating text embeddings from my posts and rank them by similarity. Before you continue reading, the usual disclaimer: Do not take the information here as good or best practice. The purpose of this entry is to post my learnings in somewhat real-time. I will use Amazon Titan Embeddings G1 - Text available through Amazon Bedrock and SQLite to store the results. The full code can be found towards the end of this post. Read more...

Amsterdam is a busy city with residents, businesses and visitors often talked about for its good urban planning, offering a walkable city that is still accessible by car, train, metro, tram, and bus. To those who have lived in or traveled around Amsterdam you will have come across the metro and their blue cubes with an “M” and red R-NET band at the bottom. If you’ve taken the time to travel on the Amsterdam Metro, does it seem like a typical metro? Read more...

It has been 87 days since I enabled the ability to show related content at the bottom of each post on this blog, aptly titled “Related ramblings”. This uses Hugo’s built-in Related Content functionality. If you use a pre-made theme you may never directly work with this feature. I wanted to highlight how easy it was to use and how impressed and I am with the results. To enable my theme to use this features, I simply had to create a new partial that could be used in my post template. The following snippet uses .Related which takes the current page and finds every related page according to the related configuration. The first 5 are picked and rendered onto the page by referencing this partial. To view the code you can refer to the commit on the theme. Read more...

Between 1990 and 1994 eighty-one Class 1700 locomotives were built by Alstom. These were an iteration of the Class 1600 that came before, based on the French BB 7200. Over the years they were used in a push-pull configuration for DD-AR coaches, ICRm coaches, and others. By the 2010s most of the locomotives were no longer used and in 2019 the 1700 locomotives were only used to pull the IC Berlin train from Amsterdam to Bad Bentheim by NS. Designed to only support 1500V DC, the locomotive is then swapped for a German one which then pulls the passenger carriages to Berlin. Read more...

Well, it’s time to revisit the topic of leaf fall. About a month has passed since my last post on the subject of adhesion and leaves on the track, and it is time for a quick update. As of 8th November, ProRail has deemed it unsafe to operate trains between Utrecht Centraal and Utrecht Maliebaan, the home of the railway museum. The culprit? Leaves on the track causing the train to go incognito. Read more...

It was a rainy Saturday afternoon when I was at a cafe with my wife scrolling through Hacker News when I came across Arne’s blog on why you should write your own static site generator (SSG). I had recently gone down that road myself, at least partially, so seeing someone’s views on the same topic intrigued me. I’ve been meaning to gather my thoughts around the subject, and what better time than now as somewhat of a response to Arne’s blog? Read more...

There have been a number of occasions where I needed to insert JSON objects into an SQLite database, the sqlite-utils Python library and CLI tool handled the task every time. I will be showcasing some of the JSON-inserting capabilities via CLI below. Inserting a single JSON object Here the object is stored in data.json, sqlite-utils takes in the insert command, the name of the database, the name of the table, the filename, and lastly, I also specify the column to use as the primary key. Read more...

To plot rail stations on a map for past blogs1 and toots23 I needed to fetch their longitudinal and latitudinal coordinates. This process can be described as geocoding, getting a coordinates from name or address. There are many powerful libraries out there that have the capability to do this, but I wanted something quick and simple to get started, this is where Nominatim comes in. In their own words: Nominatim (from the Latin, ‘by name’) is a tool to search OSM data by name and address and to generate synthetic addresses of OSM points (reverse geocoding). It has also limited capability to search features by their type (pubs, hotels, churches, etc). Read more...

It’s that time of year again, pumpkin spice lattes are in at Starbucks, sweaters are making their way out of storage and leaves are falling off trees. That last point concerns this thread more than the others. Damp leaves and train tracks are not the best match. Wheel-rail contact and adhesion The train wheel and rail meet on a very small surface area, called the contact patch. That small area must have enough friction to start and stop the train. The term adhesion is used to refer to the coefficient of friction, or grip, between the rail and the wheel1. Adhesion is measured in Mu (μ), which is a decimal number between 0.0 and 1.0 (or more than one if the force of friction is greater than the normal force). The lower this value the more slippery the contact patch is meaning there’s less friction. Typically more grip is required to start a train than the stop it.2 Read more...

What I like about Sass and other CSS preprocessors, despite my limited usage of them, is the ability to nest CSS elements to assign style rules to children. Earlier this year the first version of the CSS Nesting Module specification was published by W3C. This brings the feature of CSS nesting to the browser! According to CanIUse, nesting is already supported by all major browsers as of this year. Here’s a basic example, I have an article with a <h1> and <h2> header where I’d like all <h2> headers within the article to be blue. Read more...

I host all my images outside of Hugo to prevent any large files from residing in my git repository. This has led me to serve high resolution images in most of my posts which aren’t ideal for the end user. I recently learned about Hugos ability to get remote images, aptly titled resources.GetRemote, which then allows me to apply Hugo’s image rendering capabilities. This video by Eric Murphy covers some compressing and resizing methods within Hugo that I’ve applied to this blog. A detailed list of all the processing options can be found in the Hugo documentation. Read more...

Markdown is a neat and simple way to format text using a basic editor. You’ll have come across it on various different forums, instant messaging apps, and blogging platforms among other places where text fields are used. It was created by John Gruber in 2004 and had then been adopted across different platforms but lacked a standardised implementation. To address these inconsistencies, Jeff Atwood, John MacFarlane, and others have formed a group in an effort to standardise. Since 2014, text/markdown is now a recognized MIME type, and CommonMark was released which is the specification and test suite we need! Read more...

Update 2023-12-19: Got an update from the issue I raised that the AWS Backup Access Policy and IAM role issue has been resolved in the Terraform AWS Provider version v5.30.0 via this Pull Request thanks to @nam054 and @johnsonaj. They delay has now been added as part of the provider itself and I’ve confirmed it works! You can disregard the rest of this post or continue reading if you’re interested. I recently came across an InvalidParameterValueException when trying to add a newly created AWS IAM role as a principle within an AWS Backup access policy in Terraform. It worked after applying the Terraform module a second time. After multiple repeated trials I found the module always failed on the first attempt but succeeded on the second. It seemed odd and after an embarrassingly long time searching online, I came across a pattern in the reported errors in the issues on the AWS Terraform Provider repository. These included MalformedPolicyDocument, InvalidPolicy, InvalidParameterValue among others, all related to referencing recently created IAM resources. Read more...

The year is 1992, Sir Mix-a-lot’s Baby got Back is on the pop charts, and the Dutch railway (NS) is dominated by the Mat ‘64 trains, with a fleet of 246 units. These trainsets were introduced in 1961, making them 31 years old by 1992. Also during this time, the original Sprinter, the Stadsgewestelijk Materieel (SGM) is only 17 years old and approaching the middle of its expected lifespan. Read more...

The following post outlines how to use ffmpeg to take a number of images and create a video with each image present for a set duration with cross fades. The images are centered in the video with a black background. There are some instances when a previous image may be visible if it’s too large, it’s been a while since I tested this thoroughly so it could use some tweaking. Read more...

Sprinters in the Netherlands are easily recognisable by their blue and white livery. These trains are specifically designed to accelerate and decelerate quickly, making frequent stops along their route. In contrast, Intercity trains primarily serve large stations with fewer intermediary stops. During the 1960s and 1970s, the Netherlands went through a wave of suburbanisation, prompting the government to start the construction of planned cities such as Nieuwegein.1 It was during this time that the Dutch national railway company, NS, released “Spoor naar ‘75” a plan outlining the future of public transport in the country. The NS emphasized the importance of aligning city development with existing rail infrastructure and implementing integrated fare systems across different transport providers.23 Read more...

Disclaimer: Do not take the information here as a good or best practice. The purpose of this site is to post my learnings in somewhat real-time. AWS IAM Identity Center (previously and more commonly known as AWS SSO) allows you to control access to your AWS accounts through centrally managed identities. You can choose to manage these identities through IAM Identity Center, or through external Identity Providers (IdPs) such as Okta, Azure AD, and so on. AWS already has good documentation for all these sources. I have my identities on Keycloak which was a little bit difficult to set up for the first time, hence this post. Read more...

The contents of this post were originally toots on Mastodon, you can find the original thread there. @PeskyPotato 24 June 2023 19:34 Recently, I had the opportunity to ride the Elizabeth Line, a commuter rail and rapid transport system, much like the Paris RER, connecting greater London to its core. After starting construction in 2009 it was officially inaugurated on 17 May 2022, the line goes from Reading and Heathrow in the west to Shenfield and Abbey Wood in the east. As part of the construction, 10 new stations were built along with refurbishing some of the existing stations along the route making them more accessible. Read more...

European Sleeper is a Dutch startup created in 2021 with plans to run European night trains. Formed by Elmer van Buuren and Chris Engelsman, the train operator ran their first passenger service on 25th May 2023, from Berlin to Brussels, through Amsterdam, Rotterdam and Antwerp. From 2024, European Sleeper also plans on expanding past Berlin to Dresden and Prague. Since earlier 2022, I’ve been closely following the progress made by European Sleeper, anticipating their first ride. Although not a passenger myself yet, I was thrilled that this new train connection allows holidaymakers more sustainable, time efficient and dare I say entertaining travel opportunities. The Man in Seat 61 highlights some interesting travel connections that could be made using through the European Sleeper. Read more...

The contents of this post were originally toots on Mastodon, you can find the original thread there. @PeskyPotato 14 May 2023 11:56 This weekend we have the series 7000 and 9000 manufactured by AnsaldoBreda for the #Madrid #Metro 🇪🇸, in 2002 and 2006 respectively. They're designed for the wide guage lines and come in single and dual-voltage variants as the metro system use both 600V DC and 1500V DC through rigid overhead catenary. Read more...

The contents of this post were originally toots on Mastodon, you can find the original thread there. @PeskyPotato 6 May 2023 15:37 Not all Dutch trains are yellow! This is the Protos, an EMU built by Fahrzeugtechnik Dessau (FTD). Only 5 of these trains were ever put in service and they all run on the Valleilijn 🐓between Amersfoort and Ede-Wageningen operated by Connexxion since 2007. #train Read more...

The contents of this post were originally toots on Mastodon, you can find the original thread there. @PeskyPotato 30 April 2023 17:10 It's the weekend again, and it's time to spew information on my current rail obsession. The Netherlands started electrifying railway lines in the 1900s, and during WW2 concrete catenary masts were favoured because of the scarcity of steel. The Utrecht-Hilversum line was electrified in 1942 and received these unique horseshoe-like shaped portals nicknamed de Gotische Bogen (the Gothic Arches). Read more...

The contents of this post were originally toots on Mastodon, you can find the original thread there. @PeskyPotato 19 April 2023 06:38 And we're off! Behold the wasp, it's shiny and smells like brand new sneakers. #train #ICNG Replies: 1 Boosts: 0 Favourites: 2 | Source @PeskyPotato 19 April 2023 07:53 @phrawzty Indeed! Read more...

The contents of this post were originally toots on Mastodon, you can find the original thread there. @PeskyPotato 15 April 2023 15:18 Talgo, innovative Spanish train manufactuer, started experimenting in the 1930s with self-guiding wheels, articulated trainsets and aluminium train bodies with a low center of gravity to come up with the Talgo II. Replies: 1 Boosts: 0 Favourites: 1 | Source @PeskyPotato 15 April 2023 15:20 Talgo II was manufactured by American Car Foundry under Talgo's watch entering service in 1950 between Madrid, Spain and Hendaye, France, traveling up to 120 km/h. Read more...

The AWS API allows you to list-rules which returns a list of all the rules but does not list targets. The API also provides you with list-targets-by-rule which allows you to list the targets associated with a specific rule. If you want to find all the rules with a specific target, this case an event bus, you can join both of them together. No idea if this is acceptable practice, or if I’ll ever use this again, but I will unleash this string of commands and pipes to the world. Read more...

The contents of this post were originally toots on Mastodon, you can find the original thread there. @PeskyPotato 1 April 2023 09:31 We're spotting Jacobs bogies! A Jacobs bogie is shared across two carriages as opposed to two bogies per carriage. Pictured is the Thalys PBKA at Paris Nord, NS SLT, and NS SNG at Utrecht Centraal. #train Replies: 0 Boosts: 0 Favourites: 1 | Source

The contents of this post were originally toots on Mastodon, you can find the original thread there. @PeskyPotato 5 March 2023 11:39 Here's Lisbon's very popular #Tram 28E at Praça Martim Moniz. Carris operates 6 tram routes, 5 of which are served by these classic refurbished trams, and one by articulated trams built by Siemens/CAF and Siemens/Sorefame. Replies: 1 Boosts: 0 Favourites: 0 | Source @PeskyPotato 5 March 2023 11:42 p.s. locals frequently use the trams the move around the city, with a lot of tourists lines can get long. So if you are a tourist consider using the red tram which also goes along route 28. Read more...

This post details how to update a domain record entry on Linode based on the public IP of a machine running Linux. We will create a python script and use the Linode API to accomplish this. Create a personal token in Linode From your Linode console under My Profile > API Tokens you can create a personal access token. The script only requires read/write access to the Domains scope. From here you can also set your desired expiration time. Read more...

The contents of this post were originally toots on Mastodon, you can find the original thread there. @PeskyPotato 25 February 2023 14:13 This is an M2 metro set built by Linke-Hofmann-Busch (LHB). All fairly alike, the M1/M2/M3 sets were used when the Amsterdam metro first opened on 14 October 1977. They were nicknamed "Zilvermeeuw" (translates to Herring Gull) for their shiny stainless steel exterior. This set was the last to be taken out of service on 19 December 2015 as the newer M5/M6 series from CAF were introduced between 2012 and 2015. Read more...

The contents of this post were originally toots on Mastodon, you can find the original thread there. @PeskyPotato 19 February 2023 20:20 This is the diesel-electric NS DE4 (and SBB RAm TEE) developed by SBB and NS for the Trans Europ Express and put in service in 1957. Five of these 4-part trains were built, each consisting of a power car, passenger car, dining car and control car. #train Replies: 1 Boosts: 0 Favourites: 1 | Source @PeskyPotato 19 February 2023 20:21 The trainsets were discontinued in 1973 and sold to Ontario Northland Railway in 1977. After trouble adjusting to the Canadian weather they were removed in 1992. They found themselves back in Europe by 1998 and eventually in the possession of the TEE Netherlands Foundation. Read more...

The contents of this post were originally toots on Mastodon, you can find the original thread there. @PeskyPotato 17 February 2023 21:55 Last month Strukton showcased their battery powered locomotives at a press event with the State Secretary for Infrastructure and Water Management. This isn't just a battery powered locomotive but can also be charged through overhead lines. https://struktonrail.com/our-stories/news/2023/01/state-secretary-gives-green-light-for-rail-terminal-lage-weide-and-battery-locomotive/ Replies: 1 Boosts: 0 Favourites: 0 | Source @PeskyPotato 17 February 2023 21:56 Strukton Rail previously purchased one NS Class 1600 locomotive and three NS Class 1700 locomotives, all built by Alstom. These were previously used to transport passengers with NS DD-AR double-decker carriages. Read more...

The contents of this post were originally toots on Mastodon, you can find the original thread there. @PeskyPotato 12 February 2023 06:52 It's the weekend and time for #trains! Here's the MI 2N "Altéo" a dual-voltage EMU from Alstom and Bombardier that serves the busiest rail line, RER A, in France and possibly Europe. Replies: 1 Boosts: 0 Favourites: 1 | Source @PeskyPotato 12 February 2023 06:53 I'm impressed with the efficiency at which the Paris metro runs. Before the MI 2N, single-decker MS 61 trainsets were used. The SACEM, a speed train protection system, was rolled out in the 1980s to allow shorter gaps between trains allowing for higher frequency on those trains. Read more...

I recently visited Disneyland Paris and I spent more time researching and experiencing the Paris metro system and the RER than looking up and preparing for Disneyland itself. Upon visiting the park in Disneyland Paris I was pleasantly surprised to be greeted by a railway line right by the park entrance. There was no crowd, no line whatsoever, just an elegantly designed station. Going up the stairs I saw the steam locomotive coupled to passenger cars about to depart. I just stumbled across a train! Read more...

Disclaimer: Do not take the information here as a good or best practice. The purpose of this site is to post my learnings in somewhat real time. Create an OIDC IdP on AWS This needs to be done once for an AWS account, this configures the trust between AWS and GitHub through OIDC. Read more...

Install exiftool. sudo apt install exiftool # sudo apt install libimage-exiftool-perl Remove all tags. exiftool -all= image.jpg Remove only EXIF tags exiftool -EXIF= image.jpg

Server and client setup Install Wireguard on both server and client sudo apt install wireguard Create the public and private key on both server and client. Store the private keys in a secure place. wg genkey | tee privatekey | wg pubkey > publickey Server configuration Create and open the file /etc/wireguard/wg0.conf. Insert the following block and view the examples on the table below. Read more...

Recursively deleting all objects in a bucket and the bucket itself can be done with the following command. aws s3 rb s3://<bucket_name> --force If the bucket has versioning enabled any object versions and delete markers will fail to delete. The following message will be returned. remove_bucket failed: s3://<bucket_name> An error occurred (BucketNotEmpty) when calling the DeleteBucket operation: The bucket you tried to delete is not empty. You must delete all versions in the bucket. The following set of command deletes all objects, versions, delete markers, and the bucket. Read more...